Advertisements

To read more than 200 comments...

Click on the title of any post. It is a link to a separate page that shows all the comments. Scroll down to the bottom of the comments until you see the words newer and newest next to the number of comments on the right. Those words are links that will lead you to a new page of comments. :)

Friday, December 06, 2019

This deceased tough guy actor was not what he seemed. In fact, his life can be divided into two parts - Prior to a serious accident and after a serious accident.

Prior to the accident, he played secondary roles, mostly henchman and other unsavory types. After the accident, he graduated to slightly meatier roles on TV and in film. His biggest roles came a little later in films shot in a foreign country of a specific genre that helped propel a permanent A++ actor into the stratosphere. This actor also benefited and he had a solid career as a lead in foreign films and later smaller roles in a film by a famous horror director and in another film with a popular action star. This film was later the inspiration for a brief TV series.

But the truth about the accident is the actor did not survive. It was a head-on collision and the actor was pronounced dead at the the scene. So who starred as the actor in the rest of his career?

The actor had a close relative who somewhat resembled the actor in the face. Two main differences 1.) The relative was a couple of inches taller 2.) The relative had bushier facial hair and thinner hair on his head. As the actor had several film commitments at the time of his death, his agent got the studio and the PR people to put out a fake story that the actor was badly injured but had survived and convinced the relative to take on the role.

The relative had his own business doing something unrelated but found he really enjoyed acting so began doing it full time under the name of his deceased relative. Only thing was the actor had a slight disfigurement the result of a small home accident and the relative had to have surgery so he matched this. Both men were alcoholics which ran in the family as well as heavy smokers so there was no difference there.

In regards to the actor’s marriage which had been under strain anyway, the first wife was paid off not to talk about the substitution and granted a divorce after the accident, his children were also convinced to along with the charade as well. The relative was married two more times as the actor. The third and most successful was to a woman he had dated as himself years earlier before he took on the role of the actor.

Clarence Leroy Van Cleef Jr. (January 9, 1925 – December 16, 1989), was an American actor best known for his roles in Spaghetti Westerns such as For A Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Hatchet-faced with piercing eyes, he declined to have his nose altered to play a sympathetic character in his film debut, High Noon, and was relegated to a non-speaking outlaw as a result. For a decade he was typecast as a minor villain, his "sinister" features overshadowing his acting skills. After suffering serious injuries in a car crash, Van Cleef had begun to lose interest in his declining career by the time Sergio Leone gave him a major role in For a Few Dollars More. The film made him a box-office draw, especially in Europe.

Van Cleef also starred opposite Peter Graves in 1956's It Conquered the World, later re-filmed by Larry Buchanan as Zontar: The Thing From Venus. And later still, parodied by SCTV with Bonar Bain (Conrad Bain's real-life brother) in the Van Cleef role.

I can see how this could be conflated into an urban legend about Van Cleef being replaced by his brother, depending on when the legend first started.

F*ck off Unknown, Lee Van Cleef was pretty cool and as far as we know didn't assault anyone unlike half of back in the day Hollywood.

"He lost the last joint of the middle finger of his right hand while building a playhouse for his daughter.[17]

In 1958, a severe car crash nearly cost Van Cleef his life and career. A resulting knee injury made his physicians think that he would never ride a horse again. This injury plagued Van Cleef for the rest of his life and caused him great pain. His recovery was long and difficult and halted his acting for a time. He then began a business in interior decoration with second wife Joan, as well as pursuing his talent for painting, primarily of sea and landscapes.[citation needed]

Despite suffering from heart disease from the late 1970s and having a pacemaker installed in the early 1980s,[18] Van Cleef continued to work in films until his death on December 16, 1989, at age 64.[19] He collapsed in his home in Oxnard, California, from a heart attack.[20] Throat cancer was listed as a secondary cause of death.[21] He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, Hollywood Hills, California, with an inscription on his grave marker referring to his many acting performances as a villain: "BEST OF THE BAD".[22] "

I'm looking at pics on Google images. You're right. In early photos he had a short pointy nose with average nostrils. in later ones he has a much more noticeably down pointed flared nose. Like a down arrow almost. Now they could attribute to that to plastic surgery because of the accident - but does give one pause 5hat the story might be true.

I grew up in the 70's with my father watching all the Clint movies, especially the westerns. They never interested me much until recently and I saw a couple of the Italian ones-they're pretty friggin funny! I had no idea there was intentional humor in them, it's kinda dark which is my fav kind.

Off topic: Anyone seen JoJo Rabbit? I"m dying to see it. I loved What we do in the Shadows-hysterical.

Sounds like Lee Van Cleef to me. Horror director was John Carpenter in Escape From New York, and the movie-then-tv show they mention is probably Master Ninja which became the tv show "The Master". Sho Kosugi was a main character and Claude Akins was in it too, alongside a young Demi Moore clearly paying off some bills. MST3K had a lot of fun with that one.

True or not, what an entertaining idea.

@SlimKeith - JoJo Rabbit is one of the best films I've seen in a long, long time. The acting was superb (the child actors especially) and even Scarlett Johansson did a good job. Highly recommended.

Advertisements

Patreon

Search Crazy Days and Nights

Get in touch & Follow us

Advertisements

Labels

Advertisements

Design By

Advertisements

Disclaimer & Privacy Policy

Crazy Days and Nights is a gossip site. The site publishes rumors, conjecture, and fiction. In addition to accurately reported information, certain situations, characters and events portrayed in the Blog are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Information on this site may contain errors or inaccuracies; the Blog’s proprietor does not make warranty as to the correctness or reliability of the site's content. Links to content on and quotation of material from other sites are not the responsibility of Crazy Days and Nights.

Cookies & 3rd Party Advertisements
Google, as a third party vendor, uses cookies to serve ads on your site. Google's use of the DART cookie enables it to serve ads to your users based on their visit to your sites and other sites on the Internet. Users may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.
We allow third-party companies to serve ads and/or collect certain anonymous information when you visit our web site. These companies may use non-personally identifiable information (e.g., click stream information, browser type, time and date, subject of advertisements clicked or scrolled over) during your visits to this and other Web sites in order to provide advertisements about goods and services likely to be of greater interest to you. These companies typically use a cookie or third party web beacon to collect this information. To learn more about this behavioral advertising practice or to opt-out of this type of advertising, you can visit http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp.